Criterion Corner-DVD/Blu-ray Reviews
Entries from March 2020
“A
FEMME FATALE IN TECHNICOLORâ€
By
Raymond Benson
John
M. Stahl’s celebrated melodrama from 1945, Leave Her to Heaven, is often
cited as a film noir. I argue—vehemently—that it is not. It is a
melodrama with elements of a crime in the plot, but it does not contain any of
the signature traits of true film noir other than the presence of a femme
fatale (and a glorious one at that, in the form of Ellen Berendt, played by
the luminous and Oscar-nominated Gene Tierney).
Film
noir is
exclusively black and white by definition. Leave Her to Heaven is filmed
in gorgeous Technicolor. Film noir must contain a crime, which Heaven
does, but it is not the essential plot device. The protagonist of Heaven—writer
Richard Harland (played by Cornel Wilde)—is not a cynical, hard-boiled
character, which is a fundamental ingredient of film noir. In this case
he is a victim of a mentally ill woman who is so possessive of him that she
destroys everything around him, including her own sister, Ruth (adopted into
her family, played by Jeanne Crain). There are no bizarre plot twists of the
type usually seen in film noir; no dialogue filled with innuendo; no
scenes in shabby bars, motels, or streets; no night scenes; no corrupt law or
authority figures (unless Vincent Price’s D.A. counts for being overly jealous
of Harland); no camerawork evoking the style of German Expressionism; no
thematic emphasis on fate or destiny; no flashbacks or voice-over narration;
and, most tellingly, it has a happy ending. (All of the above examples are
common attributes of pure film noir.)
No,
the most film noir element that Leave Her to Heaven has going for
it is the femme fatale character… and she is also perfectly at home in
the old-fashioned domestic melodrama, which is what this motion picture
certainly is. Granted, she is a bit more twisted than most antagonists in
“women’s pictures,†in which director Stahl specialized during the 1930s. That
said, as a melodrama, Heaven is quite good. The acclaim it receives for
the color photography is well deserved (it won the Oscar for Color
Cinematography).
The
story in a nutshell—Richard meets Ellen on a train on the way to visit friends
in New Mexico. Ellen is engaged to someone else, but within a few days, she
breaks off the engagement and talks Richard into marrying her. She then
proceeds to dominate Richard’s life, even pushing out his beloved disabled
younger brother (which will lead to the tragic, evil, most famous sequence in
the picture), and her own family. The term “mental illness†was probably not
used much in 1945, but Heaven is a masterful depiction of a woman with
that affliction. This is what the movie is about—not the crime that
takes place in the story.
It's
all very engaging, although the courtroom scene toward the end has flaws of
believability. Price’s D.A. character constantly badgers witnesses
without a single objection from the opposing lawyer (played by Ray Collins),
and the charges against the accused—and subsequent prison sentence for a
different person—are so far off base from true legal standing that it’s
laughable. (I also find Alfred Newman’s score to be a bit overbearing.)
Still—Leave
Her to Heaven is good throwback viewing to the 1940s… and, wow, that
Technicolor is something to behold on Criterion’s superb Blu-ray disk! It’s a
new 2K digital restoration by Twentieth Century Fox, the Academy Film Archive,
and The Film Foundation, and it contains an uncompressed monaural soundtrack.
The
only supplement is a thorough, informative interview with critic Imogen Sara
Smith. The booklet contains a wonderful essay by crime novelist Megan Abbott.
Criterion’s
Leave Her to Heaven package is certainly worth an upgrade if you already
own the previously issued DVD.
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BY LEE PFEIFFER
What do you do when you despise the person most likely to bring your goals to fruition? We're not talking about the Republican establishment's dilemma with Donald Trump but, rather, the central plot premise faced by the U.S. Olympic ski team coach (portrayed by Gene Hackman) in director Michael Ritchie's acclaimed 1969 film "Downhill Racer". The protagonist of the movie is one Dave Chappellet (Robert Redford), an almost impossibly handsome young man from the rural town of Idaho Springs, Colorado, who has a single-minded obsession of being America's first gold medal winner for downhill skiing in an era when the sport was dominated by Europeans. With his good looks and superficial charm, Chappellet is used to being a big fish in a small pond. He is virtually penniless and, when not practicing on the slopes of European mountains, is forced to eek out an existence by living with his cold, unemotional father (non-professional actor Walter Stroud in a striking performance.) He has no career plans beyond his single-minded obsession with getting on the Olympic team. His lack of intellectual curiosity or abilities to socialize with others don't seem to phase him. Like any narcissist he savors any small victory as a sign of his superiority over the peasants he must occasionally interact with. Chappellet lacks any self-awareness or introspection. He takes a cocky delight in being able to drive down the main street of his one-horse town, pick up a local old flame and get her to have sex in the back seat of a car. He seems oblivious to the fact that the battered vehicle belongs to his father and that he doesn't even have a place of his own to carry out his carnal activities. Chappellet gets the big break he is looking for when a top skier on the Olympic team suffers a grievous injury. The team coach, Claire, calls in Chappellet to replace him. From the start, their relationship is a rocky one. It becomes clear that Chappellet is not a team player. He skis superbly and Claire recognizes him as the team's potential best hope for victory. However, he is also alarmed by his independent streak and his inability to follow protocols. Chappellet is in this for personal glory and his teammates are viewed as unnecessary distractions. True, he can go through the rituals of socializing. He's polite to his roommate and occasionally joins the other guys for beers, but Chappellet is clearly a vacuous, self-absorbed figure. The film traces his achievements on the slope and Claire's unsuccessful attempts to turn him into a team player. Chaplette also meets a vivacious business woman in the sports industry, Carole (Camilla Sparv). He's instantly smitten by her exotic good looks and libertarian outlook toward sex. The two begin an affair but it turns sour when Chaplette can't accept the fact that Carole is an emancipated young woman who marches to her own beat. Her unwillingness to dote over him or to treat their relationship as anything but superficial bruises his ego. In Chaplette's world, it is he who treats sex partners like disposable objects, not the other way around. The film concludes with Chaplette and his teammates engaging in the make-or-break competition against top-line European skiers to see who can bring home the gold.
"Downhill Racer" was a dream project of Robert Redford, who had championed the film, which is based on a screenplay by James Salter. Redford's star had risen appreciably with Paramount following the success of "Barefoot in the Park". The studio wanted to do another film with him and suggested that he play the male lead in the forthcoming screen adaption of "Rosemary's Baby". Redford pushed for "Downhill Racer", a film that the Paramount brass had dismissed as being too non-commercial. (This was before Redford would reach super stardom with the release of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid".) Thus began a game of brinksmanship between Redford and the studio. He managed to get Paramount to supply a small budget ($2 million) and creative control over the project to him and Roman Polanski, who was enthused about directing the film. However, the studio made a counter-move and lured Polanski to direct "Rosemary's Baby". Annoyed, Redford had to find a new director and settled on Michael Ritchie, and up-and-coming talent who was eager to make the transition from television into feature films. He and Redford, along with their tiny crew, used their limited budget to travel to international ski competitions in order to film real life action on the slopes that could later be combined into the final cut of their movie. For all their efforts, "Downhill Racer" was a boxoffice disappointment and would be overshadowed by the release of "Butch Cassidy" later in 1969. Yet its a film that Redford is justifiably proud of. There are many admirable aspects of the production, not the least of which is Redford's compelling performance as a protagonist who is not very likable or sympathetic. He's also not very intelligent, either, a character flaw that doesn't seem to bother him much, as he feels he can get by on his looks. The down side of "Downhill Racer" is that when the central character is a total cad the viewer finds it hard to be concerned with his fate, unless there is a major dramatic payoff as in the case of Andy Griffith in "A Face in the Crowd" or Paul Newman in "Hud", two of the most notorious characters in screen history. Where "Downhill Racer" blows it is in the final sequence during the championship ski run. There was an excellent opportunity to end the movie on a poignant note but the movie punts and leads to an emotionally unsatisfying ending. Nevertheless the exotic scenery and fine performances (especially by Hackman, who is under-seen and under-used) compensate for a story that is as chilling as the locations in which it was filmed.
Criterion has upgraded their previously released DVD special edition to Blu-ray and it looks spectacular. There is a wealth of interesting extras, all ported over from the previous release. These include separate interviews conducted in 2009 with Robert Redford and James Salter. I found them to be most enlightening because I was blaming Salter, as the screenwriter, for being responsible for the film's unsatisfying ending. Lo and behold, Salter expresses the same exasperation. Apparently his original script called for the more dramatic finale that I was envisioning. However, he says that Redford made the change without his permission. It's still apparently a sore spot with him. For his part, Redford is defensive about the decision, saying that he felt the the ending he insisted upon was the correct choice (Note: it wasn't.) It would be interesting to see Redford and Salter lock horns over this in the same interview at some point. In any event, Redford's enthusiasm for the film is evident even if it seems to exceed that of audiences. To reiterate, it's a fine movie with many qualities but Redford has had superior, under-appreciated gems in his career. Other bonus extras on the Blu-ray include interviews with editor Richard Harris (whose work on the film is most impressive), production executive Walter Coblenz and champion skier Joe Jay Jalbert who was hired as a technical consultant and became indispensable on the production, serving as double and cameraman. The footage he captured skiing at high speed with a hand-held camera is all the more amazing because he was a novice at shooting film. There is also a vintage production featurette from 1969 and a very interesting one-hour audio interview of director Michael Ritchie at an American Film Institute Q&A session in 1977. The affable Ritchie was there to promote his latest film "Semi-Tough" but goes into great detail about how he became disillusioned with the constraints of working in the television industry where directors at that time were just hired guns whose creative ideas and instincts were constantly being suppressed. Ritchie tells an extended anecdote about shooting an episode of "The Man From U.N.C.L.E." during which he came up with a suggestion to improve a key scene in the script. He was told to mind his own business by the producer (who he doesn't name). When series' star Robert Vaughn agreed with him, Ritchie shot an alternate version of the scene that was met with enthusiasm by the network. Instead of being congratulated, he was blackballed from the series henceforth. Ritchie would go on to make some very fine films including "The Candidate" (again with Redford), the wacko-but-mesmerizing crime thriller "Prime Cut", "The Bad News Bears" and others. However he never lived up to his full potential and ended up directing many middling films before his untimely death at age 63 in 2001. The AFI audio included here is a rare opportunity to listen to his views on filmmaking while he was at the height of his career. The Blu-ray set also contains the original trailer and a collectible booklet with essay by Todd McCarthy.
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“FILMING
MEMORIESâ€
By
Raymond Benson
The
art-house darling of 2018, like 2019’s Parasite (from South Korea), was a foreign language
film from Mexico. Except that it didn’t play in many art houses—it was a streaming
Netflix production, and that’s how most people in the U.S. saw it (although the
picture did play in cinemas a short time in order to qualify for Academy
Awards).
Roma
emerged
from the memories of its creator, Alfonso Cuarón, who grew up in the
Colonia Roma neighborhood of Mexico City. Taking place in 1970-1971, when Cuarón
himself was between the ages of eight and ten, Roma is the story of a maid/nanny
who lives with an upper middle-class household and is, for all intents and
purposes, a member of that family. Apparently Cuarón
had been close to his nanny, and the picture is a compilation of fictionalized
memories from his childhood.
Cuarón
took great pains to recreate the house where he grew up, the neighborhood, and
milieu in the city during that period. In fact, the production utilized the
house directly across the street from the one in which the Cuarón
family lived. The filmmaker also served as his own cinematographer, shooting
the picture in widescreen black and white digital—thus creating a completely
grainless, “modern†look to a movie taking place in the early seventies. The
results are absolutely gorgeous.
Roma
is a
slow burn that sucks you in at a meticulous pace, but once the characters and
the mesmerizing tone of the piece have begun to work their magic, you can’t
escape. As with 2019’s The Irishman, also a Netflix streamer, I heard
many complaints that Roma was “boring.†I blame that reaction on folks sitting
at home, most likely in a living room with the lights on, with distractions
galore, looking repeatedly at a phone in hand, and the lack of attention one
might alternatively devote if the locale was a movie theater. Roma was anything
but boring. It was an intimate study of a family on a broad,
impressionistic canvas.
Yes,
there’s a story. Cleo, the maid (vulnerably played by Oscar-nominated Yalitza
Aparicio), enjoys a pleasant life working for the family of a doctor, Antonio (Fernando
Grediaga), and his wife SofÃa (Oscar-nominated
Marina de Tavira). She is close to the four children, but especially one of the
boys (Cuarón’s alter-ego). During the course of the
picture, Cleo becomes pregnant by a young man who then wants nothing to do with
her, Antonio leaves his wife for another woman, and the family unwittingly clashes
with political events in the street (the violent El Halconazo of June
1971). This description barely scratches the surface of the tremendous depth of
emotion and wonder that Roma evokes, but suffice it to say that the film
is more an experience than a movie.
Unlike
Parasite, Roma did not win the Best Picture Oscar for which it
was nominated, but it did pick up trophies for Director and Cinematography
(both for Cuarón) and Foreign Language Film, the first title from Mexico to do
so.
The
Criterion Collection, thank goodness, released Roma on Blu-ray and DVD
(original content from Netflix rarely makes it to home video). The deluxe
package is exceptional. The 4K digital master was supervised by Cuarón
and contains a Dolby Atmos soundtrack—and it looks and sounds fantastic.
The
supplements are plentiful. A feature-length “making-of†documentary, Road to
Roma, is a virtual filmmaking lesson from Cuarón
as he relates how the movie happened from conception to release, complete with
behind-the-scenes footage. Another long piece, Snapshots from the Set,
features interviews with producers Gabriela RodrÃguez and Nicolás
Celis, actors Aparicio and de Tavira, production designer Eugenio Caballero,
casting director Luis Rosales, and others. If that weren’t enough, there are
documentaries on the movie’s design, sound, and post-production processes, as
well as a doc on the film’s release campaign and its social impact in Mexico.
There are alternate French subtitles and Spanish SDH. The enclosed, thick
booklet contains several essays with beautifully reproduced images from the movie
(with notes by Caballero).
Although
you can still stream Roma on Netflix, the Criterion edition is a superb
collectors’ package with an abundance on material you don’t otherwise get. Highly
recommended.
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